Tolstoy’s Pacifism By Colm McKeogh

Chapter 1:

Life

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know, it seems to me that if I were to learn this unknown bit of knowledge it would have no interest for me: it would not reveal anything new to me, nothing new that I want to know. I desire nothing from the outer phenomena of the world.

And so I have reached old age, that inner spiritual condition in which nothing from the outer world has any interest, in which there are no desires and one sees nothing but death ahead of one.

…the first feeling I experienced when I reached old age was bewilderment, then terror, a deep feeling of despair that the smart phrase of the poet is not just a phrase, but that life really is a stupid and empty joke which someone has played on us.

—Tolstoy, 1875 ⁴¹

He turned to see how the common people of Russia managed to live, how the poor and the unlearned found meaning in their existence. He found that they lived by something human reason could never discover: faith. What gave meaning to the lives of most of humanity was a faith that included the conception of an infinite God, the divinity of the soul, the unity and reality of the spirit, the relationship of human affairs to the divine, and moral conceptions of good and evil. It was in that faith that Tolstoy too found his truth about life. Tolstoy had found meaning and purpose in his life, but not through reason and the four choices it presented. The outcome of his crisis was his adoption of a fifth approach, the spiritual one. Indeed, it was this nonrational answer, he believed, that had sustained people through the ages and had allowed humankind to avoid despair and suicide. As he wrote in his Confession:

…it was clear to me that, in order that a man might live, he either must not see the infinite, or must have such an explanation of the meaning of life that the finite is equated to the infinite.

I began to understand that in the answers which faith gave there was preserved the profoundest wisdom of humanity, and that I had no right to refute them on the basis of reason…